Gary Taxali "Last Year's Winner"
Last Year's Winner
Gary Taxali Solo Exhibition
Sept 6 - 30, 2007
Magic Pony is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Gary Taxali. Last Year's Winner showcases over sixty new mixed media pieces including collaborative works with musicians Jad Fair, Aimee Mann and Danko Jones. The exhibition runs from September 6 - 30, 2007. The opening reception is September 6 from 7-10pm. The artist will be in attendance.Gary Taxali mixes vintage advertising vernacular with contemporary jest, simultaneously poking fun and embracing the sheer absurdness of human nature. On vintage text book pages and discarded aluminum street signs, Taxali's original characters spill onto their chosen backdrop with cheeky abandonment. Illustration, painting, stamps, and silkscreen are ingeniously collaged on each bygone surface creating disconcerting wit amongst layers of memory. Oddly nostalgic and immediately comical, Last Year's Winner celebrates each characters triumphs and defeats with equal appreciation.
"The work of Gary Taxali takes a basically juvenile bibliophilic impulse - doodling in the leaves of borrowed books - to a more artistically sophisticated level. The books he appropriates aren't the precious kind one sees fashioned into delicate, romantic assemblage works but the thick, hardy sort that fill high school libraries and suffer the consequent abuse. He arranges their covers and pages in grids of varying sizes and embellished these grids with an entertaining cast of cartoonish characters, random words and phrases, and icons of one sort and another. There (sic) is an appealing sense of play, drawn from childhood but supported by a mature iconographic sensibility."
-Holly Myers, Art Critic, The Los Angeles Times
"Though raised in Toronto, this is one of Gary Taxali's first solo Canadian shows; his successful career, however, has brought him publication in the likes of Newsweek, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. His works are exceedingly distinctive (indeed, as a contemporary illustrator he's as eminently branded and as uncompromising as they come): oft inspired by vintage images, his designs are stamped, screen-printed or hand-painted on a collage of media."
- David Balzer, Toronto Life
Opening Reception:
Thursday Sept 6th 2007
7-10pm
Gary Taxali will be in attendance
Runs Sept 6 - 30, 2007